A couple months ago, my co-worker Laura Wolfgang stood at the door of my office holding an open package and beaming like she'd just gotten a raise. "Look," she said. Out of the box she pulled a fancy, artisanal lame—a razor-edged tool to put decorative slashes into the fancy, artisanal loaves of sourdough she'd been making in her home for weeks.

I didn't need to see Laura tear open a package like it was the first day of Hanukkah to know that she had fallen deep down the sourdough rabbit hole. Lately, she'd talked about little else. Like somebody who starts doing CrossFit, or suddenly gets hip to Game of Thrones, sourdough fiends feel overwhelmed by ritualistic pleasure. And so they talk about it—and talk about it, and talk about it. And then they go shopping for accessories—why not?

The surprising thing is, Laura isn't one of Epi's food editors, writers, or recipe developers. She's our product manager, in charge of wrangling tech rather than dough. She's not even a crazy food obsessive. But such is the power of sourdough: Anyone can hear its siren call. And as obsessions go, it's a pretty good one to have. I loved hearing Laura talk about her bread experiments, which she treated more like a science project than a Sunday afternoon baking jaunt. When I asked her to explain why she fixated on sourdough, she responded like this: "Once I started making sourdough at home with only three ingredients, I fell in love with the process, with witnessing the dough's transformation from a shapeless mass into something that’s alive and growing and reacting to its environment." Can't you just taste the obsessiveness?

Tasting her results didn't hurt, either. (As of this writing—but probably not for very much longer—I have a chunk of her intoxicating chocolate-cherry loaf in my freezer.)

These two bakery-worthy sourdough loaves came straight from Laura's oven, if you can believe it.

Photo by Matt Duckor, Food Styling by Laura Wolfgang

Laura is not alone in her obsession. As article after article has reported, sourdough baking is a happy epidemic—a wildly infectious, rapidly spreading trend among home cooks. In the UK, September is #sourdoughseptember. On forums such as The Fresh Loaf, September is irrelevant—every day is a sourdough day.

Partly because of that trend—but honestly, mostly because of Laura—we've given some excellent sourdough intel by master baker Rose Levy Bernbaum some new polish. And for those folks who are ready to bake bread but are wary of going quite so deep, there's a faster, not-strictly-sourdough loaf developed by Epi's Kat Sacks. Start there if you like, but be warned: You could become like Laura faster than you think.